Akira Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon, which told the same killing four incompatible ways and gave the language a term for it. He came from a family of samurai descent in Tokyo, trained as a painter, failed to make a living at it, and answered a newspaper advertisement for assistant directors in 1936 without any interest in film. He learned under Kajiro Yamamoto and directed his first picture in 1943 under wartime censorship. Rashomon won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951, which Japan had not expected and which opened Japanese cinema to the world. Seven Samurai invented most of the grammar of the assembled-team picture and was remade as a western within six years. He cut between multiple cameras with long lenses so that actors never knew which was on them, used weather as a character, and rehearsed obsessively. He was called Tenno, the emperor, for his manner on set. Japanese critics accused him of making films for foreigners; after Dodes'ka-den failed in 1970 he attempted suicide. He worked another twenty years, financed latterly by Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg. Seven Samurai was remade as The Magnificent Seven, Yojimbo as A Fistful of Dollars - the latter without permission, and Kurosawa won the resulting suit. The Hidden Fortress supplied the two bickering peasants that became the droids of Star Wars. He worked with Toshiro Mifune on sixteen films and then never again after Red Beard, and neither man fully explained why. Dersu Uzala was made in the Soviet Union and won the foreign-language Oscar in 1976. Ran, a King Lear set in warring-states Japan, took ten years to finance and he painted every shot in advance because he expected never to shoot it.

• Lived: 1910 CE – 1998 CE
• Nationality: Japanese
• Roles: artist